Earth Day: Readers Report Green Efforts (SLIDESHOW)

Last Friday the Huffington Post asked readers to send us stories and photos of volunteer efforts in the spirit of Earth Day. As usual, readers came up big, providing us with some great anecdotes and pictures.

Earth Day has been taken up as part of a swelling national volunteerism movement. On Tuesday, President Obama visited a D.C. public boarding school, where he signed the Serve America Act, a bill to increase federal support for service. One thing the bill does is increase funding to expand AmeriCorps jobs, which service coordinators tell the Huffington Post are in greater demand than ever.

After signing the bill, the Obamas planted trees along the Anacostia river with the Bidens, Bill Clinton and several students. (Slideshow here.)

Huffington Post readers are on the frontlines of the service trend, joining the thousands who volunteered over the weekend on behalf of the environment. Earth Day Network, in partnership with Green Apple Festival, and with support from Planet Green, organized service projects in America's ten largest cities. Kids fixed up ramshackle buildings near their elementary school playground in Kentucky, urban farmers tended crops in Chicago, and legions of volunteers helped spruce up a park in San Francisco.

Here are some of the photos that volunteers submitted:

• • • • • • • • •

Deepa Garg attended the Green Apple Festival at City Farm in Chicago: "As a Chicago resident for over 10 years, I was shocked to realize there is an actual farm right in one of the most notorious neighborhoods of Chicago – Cabrini Green." Urban farming and other projects took place in Chicago during the Green Apple Festival took place from April 17-19.

Comments

[BabblingBrooks]

Ice is expanding in much of Antarctica, contrary to the widespread public belief that global warming is melting the continental ice cap.

Australian Antarctic Division glaciology program head Ian Allison said there was not any evidence of significant change in the mass of ice shelves in east Antarctica nor any indication that its ice cap was melting.
--Greg Roberts, The Australian, 18 April 2009

[JnrNorman]

I picked up trash nere the river today;
#1 item i pick up near rivers
Pepsi bottle
#2
Coke bottle
#3
Dunkin Donuts cups and bags
#4
Macdonald's cups and bags
#5
Burger King cups and bags

http://www.willthomas.net/Chemtrails/Image_Library/index_3.htm

[RuthieGix]

Everyday is Earth Day in my backyard.